The Secondary Jungle

The clouds on the jungle mountains.

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I am currently in Baos, a town in Ecuador known for the hot spring baths. It is also a good starting place for rainforest tours, and I just got back from a 3 day tour yesterday night. for the 3 day tours, you only go to the secondary forest, which is still above the malaria altitude of 500m. You do not go very far into the jungle, that would be the 5 day or more tours, and at this time I am not interested in spending 5 days in the jungle.

We started our tour with whitewater rafting, which was fun, our route was a 3+ in difficulty which is not bad. Our guides, however were two young men who seemed to want to just goof around and flirt with the young woman in the back of the boat. Also whenever rapids were approaching, they would have us all row, but I knowour rowingreally had no effect on the outcome of where we went, and was for the sole purpose so that we could not hang on. I was in the very front so every wave we hit sent the lovely freezing cold water straight into my eyes, nose, and mouth.Randomly a person here or there would fall out, mostly the girl the guides were flirting with and would throw in the water so they would have to rescue her. Eventually thewhole raft capsized and everyone fell out, the guides said that never happens, so lucky us. Luckily there are no piranhas in this river. I figure with the amount of river water I drank I am safe to drink the tap water from nearly anywhere now. I really was not thrilled with the rafting.

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After rafting we went to a little cabana in the jungle where we took hikes from. It was very interesting, Ecuador has the most amazing bugs, butterflies, spiders, birds, frogs, and other creatures. There are no large animals to be seen in this part of the jungle, but we went to a reserve where we saw all sorts of supersized rodents and monkeys. The monkeys and some of the other animals were free to run around the whole reserve and they followed us around and tried to climb on you. We were lucky it did not rain during any of our hikes, but it is so humid and we trekked through so much water that I felt soggy and nasty the whole time. The mosquitoes were not as bad asI thought they would be. The sounds at night where pretty crazy sometimes, the jungle was so loud it was almost difficult to sleep.